Voices | In this Women’s Month, let us remember the downtrodden sex worker, writes Phakamisa Mayaba
Then there are scores of mostly unknown women who perish in the dead of night. Their pictures are not masted to trending hashtags nor do they adorn the evening newsreels. They are sex workers, you see, often driven into obscene inner-city environs and, for their killers, there could be no easier targets.
A dance with death under normal circumstances, one dares not imagine how those in sex work are fairing, especially under the gruelling lockdown. What do we say to Anene Booysen, the 17 year old who was raped and disemboweled in 2013, to honour her spirit? Or Uyinene Mrwetyana whose only sin was to run an errand at the local post office.As we visualise the looming “new normal”, their normal is a perpetual brutality. Despite insisting that they are sex workers, out on the pavement they remain the slut-shamed “magosha”. Beaten. Preyed upon. Unprotected by cops.
So why, when, in March 2020, the Sex Workers Education & Advocacy Taskforce warned that, of the 118 sex workers who had died between 2014 and 2017, more than half were murdered, was this not a reason to dust off the two-year-old resolution?Rather than revisit the plight of thousands of sex workers who ask for the emancipation of their line of work in general and their bodies in particular, our ears turn elsewhere.
What is it about adult women who, whether by choice or circumstance, resolve to earn a living through selling their own bodies that has men saying no, no, you cannot? In this, the world’s most unequal society, what is the logic of mimicking social models conceived in countries directly opposed to us on the socioeconomic spectrum?
The common claim that sex work is a by-product of lack of education does not sustain. Perhaps what holds truer, however, with unemployment at nearly 75% among our youth and even graduates queueing at the labour offices, is that it is rather a matter of disopportunity than miseducation that pushes many women to the street.
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